Contemporary Yoga and Sacred Texts

This book explores the textual traditions that authorize the history, legitimacy, and authenticity of today’s physical posture practice. The volume focuses on why and how yoga communities have adopted various texts that they consider sacred or spiritually meaningful. Among the texts discussed are Yogananda‘s Autobiography, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, the Bhagavad Gita, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Upanishads, the Vedas, and the Yoginī Tantra. Famous thinkers referred to include Aurobindo, Yogananda, Osho-Rajneesh, Sogyal Rimpoche, Charles Johnston, and Howard Thurman. Offering a starting point, the ten essays address the nature, selection, and function of various ancient and contemporary texts read in contemporary yoga settings. The attention centers on how and why texts are read, and for whom they are read. As yoga is practiced in ashrams, yoga studios, gyms, meeting rooms, and even private living rooms, scholarly approaches to investigate the connections between yoga and texts are necessarily diverse.

This volume aims to inspire further scholarship on the many ways in which various texts are sacralized in yoga communities, and on the reading strategies that are used to interpret them. The collection demonstrates that these issues deserve to be an important part of contemporary yoga studies. The anthology will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of religious studies, yoga studies, and Asian studies, as well as those studying sacred texts.